“Yes, you might. And—er— What would I be doing?” he asked negligently.
“Or, since there is a lady present, I might leave you till another time.”
His handsome, cynical face, with its curious shifting lights and shadows, looked up at me for once suffused with genuine amusement.
“Stap me, you’d make a fortune as a play actor. Garrick is a tyro beside you. Some one was telling me that your financial affairs had been going wrong. An it comes to the worst, take my advice and out-Garrick Garrick.”
“You are very good. Your interest in my affairs charms me, Sir Robert. ’Tis true they are not promising. A friend duped me. He held the Montagu estates higher than honour.”
He appeared to reflect. “Friend? Don’t think I’m acquainted with any of the kind, unless a friend is one who eats your dinners, drinks your wines, rides your horses, and”—with a swift sidelong look at the girl—“makes love to your charming adored.”
Into the girl’s face the colour flared, but she looked at him with a contempt so steady that any man but Volney must have winced.
“Friendship!” she cried with infinite disdain. “What can such as you know of it? You are false as Judas. Did you not begowk my honest brother with fine words till he and I believed you one of God’s noblemen, and when his back was fairly turned——?”
“I had the best excuse in London for my madness, Aileen,” he said with the wistful little laugh that had gone straight to many a woman’s heart.
Her eye flashed and her bosom heaved. The pure girl-heart read him like an open book.